Battery

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Battery
started by: borgward

Posted by borgward on May 11 2008,19:57

How to I monitor laptop battery charge level from the desktop? I had been running CENTOS on this old Dell CPi and decided to try DSL to see if worked better w/a slow machine. CentOS had a little Icon in the system tray to alert me of the battery charge status.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on May 11 2008,22:55

You could use the included torsmo for monitoring it.

Posted by Juanito on May 12 2008,03:46

..or there are a couple of dock apps in mydsl < here >.

Posted by JPsDad on Sep. 10 2008,02:44

Quote (^thehatsrule^ @ May 11 2008,19:55)

You could use the included torsmo for monitoring it.

Could you explain to a DSL Dummy how to do that?I have torsmo running (by default) on my frugal install of v. 4.4.3. It does not say anything about bat or AC. on my Centrino laptop. An older version on an old tower does tell me it is on AC. How do I setup this configuration?Can I also throttle my CPU (Pent.M 1.6M) down to 600 when I am on battery

I did a search and this was the nearest hit to helping me.Thanks for your helpJohn

Posted by Juanito on Sep. 10 2008,03:51

The default torsmo configuration file - /home/dsl/.torsmorc - should contain a line that displays either "ac" or battery data. I think this is set to display acpi information by default.

Do you know if your laptop uses "apm" or "acpi" power management? If it uses apm, then the .torsmorc file can probably be modified to suit - see the comments in .torsmorc or on the torsmo man pages on-line.

If you have a pentium m processor, you should be able to use the "powerstep" feature as well as/instead of throttling. If I remember correctly, the acpid mydsl extension has a script to change the powerstep setting when the power is disconnected.

To check if you can change the powerstep and/or throttling settings manually, you need to look in (for example) /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance - if there is something there, you can change it by:

Code Sample

$ sudo echo x > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/performance

where "x" is 1 to 7 on my machine.

Posted by andrewb on Sep. 10 2008,04:30

You need to edit .torsmorc which is in /home/dsl

To show that battery status you will need to check the name that the battery has. Assuming the system used acpi look in the folder /proc/acpi/battery. There will be another directory - something like BAT0, BAT1, MBAT,... You need to use this name in .torsmorc to show the battery status. Towards the end of .torsmorc you will find the line:

Code Sample

${color #ddd}Battery: $color ${battery }

you need to add the name of the battery directory after 'battery ' inside the {} brackets, e.g.